An Urban's Rural View

USDA gave corn growers a rude shock on Aug. 12 with its prediction of a record 188.8 bushels per acre, a 30-cent-per-bushel drop in the farmgate price, and an additional 2.1 million acres planted to corn.

A week or so earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave Donald Trump a similarly rude shock. The BLS report showed a big slowdown in hiring during the previous three months. It said that the economy added a fewer-than-expected 73,000 jobs in July and, after big revisions, only 14,000 in June and 19,000 in May.

Unlike farmers, the president of the United States has the power to shoot the messenger when he doesn't like the message. And that's what the president did. Out went Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner.

Trump claimed the numbers were "rigged" and "manipulated for political purposes." There's no evidence to support those claims and many reasons to doubt them.

McEntarfer isn't a politico. She's a PhD economist and long-time government employee, having worked in the Census Bureau and the Treasury Department in addition to the BLS. In 2023, the U.S. Senate approved her nomination as commissioner 86-8 with then-senators JD Vance and Mario Rubio voting yes. Her predecessor as commissioner, a Trump appointee, called her firing "groundless." (https://apnews.com/…)

So, rigged? No. Trump just didn't like the message that the economy had weakened on his watch.

Yes, the numbers could be wrong. They could be revised again someday, changing the message. Constant revisions reflect a perennial problem of late reporting by some of the 121,000 employers BLS surveys each month.

Economists say the revisions are testimony to the data's integrity, showing BLS is trying to get the numbers right. But they do open the agency to criticism. BLS is working on encouraging more on-time reporting by making the reporting process easier.

Could it do more? Maybe. Defenders say budget cuts and hiring freezes have undermined the agency's efforts to improve.

But the Trump administration could argue that what's needed is fresh thinking and totally new ways of doing things. A new leader with new ideas.

Fine, but to keep BLS's work credible, any new leader needs to be a nonpartisan professional dedicated to data integrity. What Trump has done is fire just such a professional and choose a partisan to replace her --E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Institute.

Economists at other conservative think tanks say he's unqualified. One told Axios that Antoni's "work at Heritage has frequently included elementary errors or nonsensical choices that all bias his findings in the same partisan direction." (https://www.axios.com/…)

Antoni's main qualification for the job seems to be his commentary praising Trump's policies and criticizing the BLS when its numbers aren't to Trump's liking. By appointing Antoni, the president has sparked fears that what he wants is not unrigged data, but data rigged his way.

These fears may be unfair to the president. He insists straight data is his goal. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, when you choose a strident partisan for a position that's traditionally nonpartisan, this is the reaction you get.

Since being named, Antoni has suggested issuing BLS employment reports quarterly instead of monthly until response rates can be fixed. He's likely to get pushback on that.

Businesses, investors, government agencies and other users of the data count on it being issued frequently. Imagine how ag professionals would feel if USDA crop reports were only released every several months.

At his confirmation hearings, Antoni will need to convince senators of three things. That he isn't in over his head. That he understands that BLS must do its best to tell the truth, even if it's bad news for the president. And that he has a realistic plan for improving the data's accuracy, in particular for fixing the response-rate problem.

No set of statistics is perfect. That's as true of the BLS employment numbers as it is of USDA's crop estimates. There are many ways even skilled, objective professionals can go wrong in collecting, sampling, seasonally adjusting and otherwise preparing data.

Users don't like imperfect statistics. They can usually live with them if the mistakes are honest. Honest is how most users view Uncle Sam's numbers.

In other countries -- for example, China -- the statistics are less credible. Everyone knows the country's rulers aren't averse to making the numbers say what they want them to say -- or not releasing them at all when they say something different.

The last thing anyone should want is for the U.S. government's statistics to start resembling China's.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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